When searching for the best time-tracking software, it is important to not only consider what it offers and how much it costs but also look at the features that set it apart from others. All time trackers may not be created equal. Therefore, it’s important to stack up and determine which among the contenders is worthy enough to be given a try.
Of course, we mustn’t forget to look into the aspect of personal feelings as well. The final decision you make will affect your personal feelings and impact the productivity of your team.
Time Doctor is one of the most popular apps in today’s productivity market. It has both teams and single users in a stupor for its task- and time-monitoring capabilities. But has it caught us the same way? Read this comprehensive review to find out.
For those of you who prefer a more visual experience, here is a video review from Frank on his YouTube channel Franklin Rivera. To get a comprehensive overview of Time Doctor, you may still want to check out our article below.
A Closer Look at Time Doctor X Doctor Reader
Time Doctor is a time-tracking and project-monitoring platform best suited for large or small businesses, teams who work remotely, and freelance professionals. Its lineup of tools and features aims to help teammates and individuals improve their productivity by an average of 22%.
Time Doctor was launched in 2012, a little over a decade ago. It has gradually gained a large audience and is now a well-known time management tool for companies, no matter how established or new to the field. The client portal feature has made it a favorite among freelancers, who frequently work for multiple clients.
Time Doctor has accumulated a user base that exceeds 250,000 over its 20-year history. Among those who’ve used the service for time and employee management matters include Apple, Ericsson, Better Business Bureau (BBB), Verizon, Boost Media, and Thrive Market.
Some of the features Time Doctor has been renowned for are its robust time and activity tracking functions and advanced capabilities, such as setting reminders for when to start and stop the timer. These features alone may be enough for the platform to position itself way ahead of other time management apps. However, it is unable to do so because of its lack of consistency in user useability.
Despite this, we believe that Time Doctor has the potential to be a wonderful addition to any individual or team looking to expand their productivity levels. Continue reading to learn more about the unique platform’s other features and how they work! X Doctor Reader
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The pros
- Time Doctor is best recognized for its excellent, easy-to-use time and activity management tools and functions.
- It includes standout features such as pinpoint-accurate reporting, idle alerts, and automatic reminders.
- Its accessible and comprehensive client portal makes freelancer-client interactions a convenient experience.
- It offers a smooth and sizable list of integrations with third-party platforms.
The Cons
- Its messy user interface makes navigating through the platform quite different for most users, especially first-timers. X Doctor Reader
- Its mobile apps are not as flexible as its web and desktop counterparts, despite their potential.
- It doesn’t offer smooth switching between the web-based client and desktop apps, especially if you’re both the administrator and the user.
- Only the web extension or desktop app can access the time tracking function.
Plans and Pricing
Before we move on to everything else, let’s talk about the plans and how much they cost first. Time Doctor currently offers three paid subscription tiers, each with a distinctive set of features and tools that become more advanced and packed as the cost increases.
Pricing will increase depending on how many users are added to a team. Let’s check out the following three available plans in the Time Doctor platform.
- Basic – $70/user per year or $7/user per month
Time Doctor’s Basic tier includes access to the platform’s core features, such as time and activity tracking, task and project management, and unlimited screenshots. However, you can only use them if you download the desktop application or web extension. Plus, you’re limited to one month’s worth of data storage.
- Standard – $100/user per year or $10/user per month
The Standard plan unlocks the opportunity to access a few advanced features, such as tracking the apps and website URLs used by any of your teammates, the payroll tool, reporting, and an additional 60 integrations with third-party apps. It also sees upgraded time limitations to its customer support hotline – from three days to 24 hours.
- Premium – $200/user per year or $20/user per month X Doctor Reader
The premium tier offers the most comprehensive of all three. Subscribers to the Premium tier have access to all the Time Doctor features. They can explore the client portal and take screen recordings.
Those who choose to pay yearly will receive a free charge for the first two months. Time Doctor doesn’t offer a free plan. However, each of the three plans offers a limited 14 day trial that allows you to try it out and decide if it is the right tool for you.
> > Click Here to Try Time Doctor Now < <
The User Interface
Despite being filled to the brim with robust time and activity management tools, Time Doctor may be highly notorious for its clunky and poorly-designed take on the user interface and experience. It can be a pain to navigate the platform. This is especially true if you are just starting to explore the dashboard and other features.
For instance, many who’ve used Time Doctor have found issues accessing its range of functions. They’ve complained about the lack of in-app centralization, which would have saved a lot of time and effort. Until now, users can only access the time tracking feature through the desktop app or web extension. The website version only has project management, reporting, as well as other admin features. With that in mind, switching between the two portals is more frequent – you usually wouldn’t see this on other time management platforms.
Time Doctor users also need to be helped with the overall design and look. Save for the desktop app, and the website-based dashboard sure does lack a few key intuitive features which would have made for a more convenient user experience. It also needs the diversity of data graphs used for reporting – sure, and the bar graphs are great and all, but what about the circle graphs? Pie graphs, as well? Line graphs, perhaps?
It’s already clear that Time Doctor’s user interface and design don’t shine as brightly as its features – we’ll review that very shortly! However, despite their combined lackluster appeal, they’re not strong enough to fully soil the experience of tracking work activity, which the platform was designed for in the first place. Some users don’t even mind the UI issues at all, while others have learned to adjust quickly to it over time. X Doctor Reader
There is still hope that Time Doctor’s UX and UI issues could be fixed in the near future. For now, however, new users will need to learn the platform’s inner workings.
Time Doctor: Key Features
Now, let’s dive deeper into some of the features and tools you may want to explore if you log in to the Time Doctor platform.
Project and Data Management
With Time Doctor’s project management capabilities, individuals or administrators within a team can create tasks and group them into groups with just a few clicks. Administrators can also use this feature to assign tasks to their employees to reduce workload and increase productivity. You can create tasks as standalone tasks. However, you can group them together if necessary into larger projects. This is a great option for large companies whose stability depends on many departments below them.
Time Doctor knows that a clear workboard is a great way to get things done. With that in mind, admins may opt to limit access to select tasks or projects by assigning them to only a specific employee or group of employees within the team. You may want to see who is working on the task or project right now. The dashboard allows you to track their progress and see how long they have been working.
Time Doctor is unlike other time management tools. Users can create permanent trackable tasks that they can easily edit, delete, or modify without the need to add one each day. Those who work around repetitive tasks will no longer need to face this burden every time – all they need to do is change them to permanent status! X Doctor Reader
> > Click Here to Try Time Doctor Now < <
Time Tracking and Alerts
Time Doctor’s time-tracking software can only be accessed via its Chrome web extension or desktop application. Despite not being available in the web dashboard, its capabilities are surprisingly well-versed enough to make it stand independently. It’s quite straightforward – just add in the task you’re assigned to work on and click the timer’s start button to track your progress. It’s that simple!
As the timer plays out throughout your task, all your actions and activity will be recorded in the background. They will then be logged and saved to the web dashboard, where admins may use this to check on their employees’ progress on the go. You may do it the same way if you are working alone.
One unique trait of Time Doctor’s time-tracking tool that we can’t help but appreciate is allowing users to customize their set-up according to their liking until they’re content enough to work well. The software also has a reminders function that reminds you when it is time to start and stop work. Another function is the “idle time” function. This allows users to convert the time they’ve been off work into work hours and then reassign it.
If no sign of user activity is detected after a few moments, the timer will automatically bring it to a stop. If you ever spot something like this and you’ve gone to attend to other things beforehand, you may manually click the play button to resume tracking. Similarly, you may also pause it if you want to time out from work. Time Doctor allows you to create time intervals between daily tasks if you feel you need some space.
While Time Doctor can track your progress and work hours online, did you know it could also do this offline? Time Doctor, like other time-monitoring apps like Hubstaff, can track your activities and record the hours spent on your task, even without an internet connection. X Doctor Reader
Website and App Usage Monitoring
It’s not just the amount of hours that Time Doctor is keen on monitoring, as it also applies to the other desktop apps you’ve visited, the websites you’ve explored, and even the keystrokes and mouse movements you’ve made as you work. If the platform sees that the mouse cursor or keyboard hasn’t moved for longer, it will pause instantly and stay that way until you do something with it.
Often, it’s hard to tell whether someone seems productive until you find out what they’ve been doing. If they’ve been focusing on their tasks, that’s a sigh of relief. If they’ve been procrastinating by going to other platforms that divert from what they’re supposed to do, that’s a completely different story. No matter if you’re strict or relaxed with it, Time Doctor allows users to check which kinds of websites or applications their fellow teammates have used during work hours and how long they’ve glued their eyes to them.
Time Doctor has a number of monitoring features that allow admins to easily see if employees are wasting their time or attending to a task. This feature can be used to identify if the URL or application name, and the status it is in, are some of the many. This feature is available to managers and administrators to adjust the platform’s productivity rating to any one of the three ranks.
- Productive, if it serves a team/project’s purpose as a key driver to its tasks.
- If it serves no purpose and is therefore inefficient, it will be a time-waster
- If it is neither productive nor unproductive, it will be considered neutral.
These three productivity statuses are assigned to any website or app and can be adjusted to be limited to one user, group/team, or company. The ability to track website activity and customize productivity statuses per user makes it highly convenient for teams who work in jobs requiring a strong focus on specific tasks, like content writing, for instance. For what it’s worth, Time Doctor may be lucky this time to have this crucial function included, unlike other time-tracking software. X Doctor Reader
Activity Screenshots and Screen Recording
Remember when we told you about Time Doctor being able to record your tracked time and activity in the background while they’re posting the data to the web dashboard for admins to see? This is why it has built-in snapshot capabilities.
Administrators can specify a time period for screen capture across their project/team. It could be set to 10 minutes, 30 or even 30 minutes. If they please, they may also opt to select any of their teammates who should be allowed access to this feature.
As a measure of user productivity, each image includes additional information about the mouse cursor activity and keystroke activity. While those subscribed to Time Doctor’s Basic and Standard plans have access to unlimited screenshots, Premium users get the upper hand with the inclusion of video screen recording. Instead of taking pictures of the computer monitor, the platform records three minutes’ worth of work activity in action.
There may be rare instances in which someone from a project/team may be at risk of a breach of privacy caused by serious circumstances. If this happens, they may be allowed to delete screenshots or screen recordings within the Time Doctor platform for their safety. However, this will likely result in the deduction of work hours listed on the day of recording.
> > Click Here to Try Time Doctor Now < <
Productivity Reporting & Analysis
Time Doctor lets users view, edit and save pre-built reports. Each contains data and insights collected by the software during their tracked work hours, all presented in the form of decent visuals and summaries. Users can request reports to determine which time management and productivity practices are working well and which ones need to be improved.
You have so much to journey through with Time Doctor’s report collection. Its Web and App Usage report, on the one hand, lets you see how many hours you’ve spent and how active you’ve been on any website or app that’s classified as productive. On the other hand, the Poor Time Use report plots out how long you’ve sat around on sites that have been flagged as inappropriate for work. Multi-screen work setups can lead to problems, such as the possibility of one person being able to jam out to their favorite music on one screen, while working on their task on the other. Poor Time Use includes the ability to open pop-up windows to block certain websites. This means that if someone goes to YouTube, they will be immediately reminded if they wish to continue or return to their task.
Other types of reports include the Timeline report, which displays all your tracked hours in chronological order, primarily divided into the colors yellow for manual time recording and green for automatic; the Project and Tasks report, where hours spent on assigned tasks and/or projects are broken down in full detail; and the Activity Summary in which your total work hours and the full percentages derived from a combination of all other reports are laid out for you and your admin to see. X Doctor Reader
While Time Doctor’s accurate reporting tools may be impressive and all, some of its users have historically not liked experiencing certain issues while generating them. First, most reports are formatted in a clunky way, which can impact how they’re exported. Second, XSL and CSV are the only two options Time Doctor has made available and nothing else – some may be simply okay with that, but others won’t like this lack of export file diversity as much.
Client Access and White-labeling
If there’s one thing about Time Doctor that dedicated freelancers or solopreneurs can’t get enough of, it’s the ability to share the progress of their tasks with their clients, even if they are not exactly their teammates or don’t share a Time Doctor account.
You may find it helpful to know that the Client Portal feature of the platform allows you to accept commissions from many clients.
Simply send the link to the portal directly to your clients. Once they have access to it, they can see how long you’ve been working, how many tasks you completed, and even the archive of screenshots and reports. The great thing about the Client Portal is that you have full control over whatever you want your client base to see, resulting in smooth and tastefully curated interactions across the board.
Time Doctor’s white labeling feature allows you to integrate its tools with your branding if you are the owner or manager of a successful business.
Payroll
Planning to pay your employees based on how much they’ve dedicated their time to their respective tasks? You can do this within the Time Doctor platform using its built-in payroll function. You can turn on payroll deep within the settings of your web dashboard and your team will be automatically billed. You may pay your teammates based on tracked hours or on a fixed-rate basis.
Time Doctor’s payroll tool supports every form of currency in existence. As for payment methods, you may ask your employees to have their salary sent through PayPal, Payoneer, or TransferWise. For batch payments, you can export your payroll information to a CSV file if you work for a larger company. Multiple payments are sent at once.
Integrations with Third-Party Services
Time Doctor offers a wide range of integrations to various third-party platforms. These integrations are primarily focused on work, business, and productivity. With an approximate estimate of over 60 integrations, Time Doctor makes it easy for you to manage your team’s combined work in one interconnected ecosystem.
These include connections to project management platforms such as Trello and Asana, payment services such PayPal, work messaging apps such Slack and CRM platforms like Salesforce. On top of all this, a public API tool is made available for integrations with other apps beyond the given list – you may utilize this if you or your teammate know a thing or two about coding.
The Time Doctor Mobile App
Time Doctor’s desktop program is available to download and install on Windows PCs, Mac OS devices, and Linux OS computers. At the same time, its recent web extension is offered exclusively on Google Chrome. The time-tracking software offers unlimited access to its users through their smartphones. Time Doctor currently offers two mobile apps versions. You can download them both on the Apple App Store or Google Play.
No matter how you look, you may be able to track your work hours and progress even if you’re out of the office. On one side, the classic version of the app lets you overview the tasks within a project that need to be done, as well as track where your teammates are through GPS – both on top of the basic time-tracking tools and limited dashboard settings.
The latest version – Time Doctor 2 – has more or less the same functionalities as the previous iteration. The only differences that set the two apart are that 1) TD2 is only compatible with Android devices, and 2) you won’t get to explore other features aside from time tracking – a noteworthy downgrade from TD Classic.
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Time Doctor: How safe and secure is it?
You may be questioning whether Time Doctor is worth using as a time management tool. You may also wonder if its surveillance tools could keep track of your actions, even as you pause your timer momentarily to catch a quick break. Although the aspect of a 1984-esque work scenario may seem intimidating, we’re glad to tell you that your activities as the timer stops will not be tracked and saved to Time Doctor’s cloud-based database. It’s 100% not spyware material, so you’re in good hands.
We’d like to reiterate that your work activity may be tracked through screenshots and recordings, and we’d also like to add that there is a webcam shot feature that project managers may use to see their teammates right in front of their eyes…
Okay, maybe the thought of that may be quite concerning, especially for some who are protective of their privacy, but don’t worry – not all admins want to use this, so there’s a good reason why the webcam shots and screengrabs are optional and can be enabled or disabled depending on how the admin user feels.
As Time Doctor promises that all your activity and likeness will not be force-shared in vain, the same sentiment can be applied to the payment information typed into the platform by you or your teammates, which will then be automatically deleted after a short while for the sake of privacy.
Time Doctor further takes up drastic security measures to ensure that every user’s account isn’t easily breached. These measures include guaranteed protection by 2FA and a strong password policy, and all the data made within the platform is safeguarded by strong SSL encryption in maximum security facilities. Time Doctor is cloud-based so you can expect your data to be regularly backed up. You may be able to have your data restored quickly in the event of an internet or power outage. This will ensure that you don’t lose any progress.
The bottom line: Do you use Time Doctor?
Time Doctor provides a steady user base of professional teams and freelancers with the benefits of a simple, straightforward task management space and the charms of an advanced-level time tracker, creating a harmonious balance between the two.
While its line-up of dynamic features has admittedly left us in awe, the experience would have been significantly better if it weren’t for the disorienting UI and UX, lack of functionality and cohesiveness in the mobile apps, and, to an extent, undersupply of report graphics options. These problems may have hindered other users as well as us from enjoying the experience to its fullest. Still, others don’t mind anyway because it works exceptionally in what it was originally designed to do – track time.
We believe Time Doctor is able to hold its own, even though it doesn’t offer the same ease of use as other apps. Besides, every time management platform shines uniquely, right?
FAQ X Doctor Reader
How can I approach Time Doctor’s customer service team?
You can contact Time Doctor’s customer support hotline via e-mail, or live chat. At this time, there is no telephone support. However, if you have an important matter and the best and only thing you think to solve this is through talking over the phone, you may leave behind your contact details and preferred call time through any of the available outlets. A member of the hotline will notify this and reach you any day.
You won’t find any tutorials or tips for Time Doctor anywhere else.
Though there are YouTube videos and how-to articles from independent creators that have already discussed it in full detail, Time Doctor does offer its users an alternative through its dedicated help center, where most of the information included comes from the team behind the platform themselves.
Do I need to add credit card details to apply for a free trial to any of Time Doctor’s paid plans?
You don’t have to sign up with your credit card for the limited 14-day trial. If you are done with the trial period, you can bring it up again to purchase a Time Doctor subscription.
Is Time Doctor HIPAA-compliant?
Yes. Time Doctor adheres to the standards and rules of the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The platform is technically flexible enough to be used in a wide range of industries and niches. However, it can also be useful for healthcare teams.